This lake. The lake. My lake. I go to her, often with my solitary self, but she always makes room for this and so much more. Her temperamental mood and shy whispers have a way of stripping off the straitjacket of my loneliness. It’s a concerted effort sometimes, but we both prefer the tango to the waltz, the dancing to the music. We like the struggle and the kind of fire that warms our souls. Our bodies will take care of the rest. Blades of grass and pebbles of rain are our only witnesses. The trees are too proud to watch, and the stars have done it all before. Poor souls: they don’t know what they’re missing out on. Forgive us as we join blood to water. Dead leaves are falling all around us. It’s the most romantic thing in the world.
What I do sometimes feels motivated by the desire to feel like I’m improving at that thing rather than the doing of the thing itself. It’s a form of contextless motivation that is analogous to consuming dating advice without having any skin in the game or learning music theory without ever having strummed a guitar. Living in this way leaves you feeling one-step removed from life, like you’re constantly wrapped up in a condom (lol) when what you really want is contact. You may feel more comfortable and safe, especially if you’re new to the activity, but the deeper learning and improvement happens when you simply let yourself dance, when you aren’t totally concerned with improving or proving yourself.
Dear Change,
I’m having a really hard time and I’m not sure what to do with myself. I feel like I’m treading underwater. I’ve done so much of that already and still I come up with scraps as to what I need to do about it. The pieces are flimsy and disconnected and I feel aimless in all this uncertainty. As a result I’m thinking about the past a lot. What was, what could have been, ways I could have been better (so many ways god fucking damnit), another chance in the future. I ruminate about my ex-girlfriend and how she is probably doing much better without me, while I’m left feeling stuck. I want to share the rare slices of joy I find throughout my day, like how beautiful the Myrtle Tree outside my parent’s house looks around sunset time every day, the pink flowers full in their lucid bloom. She would have appreciate it from her head to her little toes, the way she always did with what was beautiful. But I can’t do that anymore. She was so good at finding the joy and beauty in things, and I was constantly aimed at the faults and explicating.
Since my recent psychedelic trip, I’ve noticed that my emotions and thought patterns have returned to a familiar baseline. I feel just as moody and temperamental as before, though the swings are certainly less erratic. Still, they can hit hard and have destabilized me when my mind wanders too deep into thinking about the future, what I’m working on, who I am, and other similar questions. Put another way, the juicy existential stuff is coming up again.
The past six months have been covered by a dark, oppressive cloud that made me doubt if I would ever feel good again. I sometimes wondered if life was worth living, and though I quickly extinguished these kinds of thoughts, I had lost faith in my ability to understand how I felt and what I needed to move myself forward. I hated being alone but couldn’t enjoy the company of others. Crying spells came over me at random times throughout the day. Nights were unbearably restless. I felt stuck and lifeless, like a ship without a sail.
I recently rewatched some old videos I had made back in my gaming days. (WoW & LoL anyone?) They reminded me of how obsessed I was with being the best, and how good I actually was, which wasn’t half-bad by most accounts. I was never quite the best, but it was enough for me to play with and be among them. That was all I really needed in life to be happy, the opportunity to keep playing the game.
I’m fascinated by the idea that seemingly small choices can have profound and unpredictable effects on the state of the future. In the study of dynamical systems, this is characterized as the phenomenon of chaos. Imagine we had a single equation that could perfectly predict how the universe would unfold for all of time. All it would need to work is a set of inputs – i.e. the initial conditions, in the parlance of mathematics – that described the current state of the universe. Feed the equation variables like number of living stars, the density of every known planet, the emotional state of all sentient beings, and anything else we can measure, in return for a singular expression that contained everything everywhere all at once.
Prior to publishing this I caught a whiff of my inner critic and felt some harshness toward myself. It amazes me how hard I can be on myself sometimes. I’m trying to (gently) change that. A little reminder then:
Without diving into the strangeness of self-worth as a concept we tout, know that your self-worth is not contingent on what you publish or its quality. Writing is simply something you like to do and share! Give that inner critic a long hug and tell him you don’t have to prove yourself to anyone.
I’ve been beating myself up over the fact that I’m not writing as much. Or rather, that I’m not writing anything I deem worth publishing. I still journal and scrap together the occasional poem, though most of it sits in draft form. My priorities are different these days, which I’m continually adjusting to. I’m focused on my finding my stride in academic research, improving my guitar skills, and generally maintaining my health and sanity after a grueling succession of months in the first half of 2022.